EVANSVILLE — Back in the summer, before the schedule was even finalized, the University of Evansville men’s basketball coaching staff was talking about travel plans for this season.

Director of operations Logan Baumann circled this upcoming Iowa trip, to Des Moines followed by Cedar Falls, and asked head coach Walter McCarty if he wanted to stay up there the whole week. McCarty didn’t give it a second thought.

“Absolutely. We’re not coming back (in between games),” he said.

It was for everyone’s peace of mind that they make one big trip out of this week, when the Aces (9-10, 3-3 Missouri Valley Conference) travel to play Drake (14-5, 3-3) on Wednesday and Northern Iowa (currently 8-11, 3-3 prior to its game at Southern Illinois) on Saturday. Both games tip off at 7 p.m.

The Knapp Center, where Drake plays, has not been kind to UE the past eight years. The Bulldogs have won seven times by an average of 17 points and last season was no different. Well, at least it wasn’t on the scoreboard.

The travel situation was a nightmare.

Due to Winter Storm Hunter, the Aces’ charter plane would not land in Evansville the night before the game to make the trip to Des Moines. It could in St. Louis, but the team would need to find a bus company willing to take them over.

Nobody would. The roads were too treacherous.

Darian DeVries is in his first year as head coach at Drake. He was formerly an assistant coach at Creighton.(Photo: Brian Powers/The Register)

After sitting at Tri-State Aero for a couple hours of trying to find a way to St. Louis, UE finally gave up and went to have dinner at LongHorn Steakhouse before reconvening at 6 a.m. the next morning. They had a quick walk-through at the practice facility, then grabbed some to-go breakfast boxes from Bob Evans before busing to Missouri.

Drake understood the situation and agreed to move the game from 2 to 4 p.m. The Aces lobbied to push it back even further – or from Saturday to Sunday – but the Bulldogs had a "Hometown Heroes" ticket promotion for first responders and military personnel that it couldn’t afford to do that.

UE arrived in St. Louis and was on a flight to Des Moines by 10 a.m. Three hours later, they got off the plane and had to go straight to Knapp Center for the game.

“We got there and basically had to go straight to the gym,” UE sophomore John Hall said. “It was not ideal. I’m pretty sure all of us had been in some type of situation like that, though.”

Unsurprisingly, the team was sluggish out of the gates and trailed 24-6 at the midway point of the first half. That proved to be the difference as they lost 81-65. The Aces hopped right back on a plane and were home by 10 p.m.

A solid 18-hour day.

It seems as though it’s always something when UE travels to Iowa this time of the year. It was stuck overnight following a 94-66 loss at Drake on New Year’s Day 2014. The same thing happened after an early-February loss to UNI in 2016. The Aces’ plane took off but was forced to circle back to the airport due to a technical issue.

This week’s weather in Iowa is not pleasant.

The team is expected to arrive in Des Moines on Tuesday night with a 10-degree wind chill and 85 percent chance of snow. They will play Wednesday and stay in the city through Thursday, practicing at a local gym, before they make the two-and-a-half-hour bus trip to Cedar Falls on Friday.